Children's Literature as Women's Writing

When I was an undergraduate student of English, not all that many years ago, critical theory was something we looked at in our final year, as a minor sideshow of interesting freaks on the periphery of the center-ring business of actually studying literature. The course I took was called "History of Criticism," for the essays we read were more important as history than as theory—for having once mattered than for any theoretical significance they might still actually have. We knew with absolute certainty that in our time scholars had arrived at the best, indeed, the only way to read and understand literature, and we simply took it for granted that we should read in a certain way. In our state of perfect understanding, we had no need of theory.

In the past fifteen or twenty years, things have changed substantially. The exciting developments in theory that have emerged from structuralist and post-structuralist thought have significantly altered the way we look at literature. The discipline as a whole has been in a yeasty state of productive turmoil as it has worked to accommodate these developments in theory into the reading of every conceivable kind of literature. Theoretical questions are a central concern not just for graduate students, who are as likely to specialize in theory as they are in Shakespeare, but also in many introductory courses in literature. The appearance last year of Reading Texts: Reading, Responding, Writing, edited by Kathleen McCormick, Gary Waller and Linda Flower signals the popularization of what was once caviar even to the general run of English professors. The book, which is intended for introductory literary courses, recommends reader-response, semiotic, and cultural approaches. Another indication of the popularity of theory is the number of sessions dealing with theory at the annual conference of the Modern Language Association; the program normally contains at least twice as many listings of sessions dealing with theory as it does of any other area of literary studies. Theory is no longer just a minor aspect of literary history—it is the central focus of contemporary literary study.

Scholars of children's literature have special reasons to be grateful for that. Theories like reader-response and feminist criticism, semiotics, and deconstruction have pointed out the repressive limitations of the traditional ways of assigning literary value that were once considered absolute, and that excluded children's literature from any curriculum of literary study that wished to be taken seriously. As an undergraduate I could take only that one small course in the History of Criticism, but there were none at all in children's literature; the mere idea of such a course would have made me and any other serious literary scholar laugh, just as would have courses in Science Fiction or Women's Literature or Media Studies. However the more traditionally-minded among us may feel about these new ways of thinking about literature, nobody can deny that they have helped to open the doors of English departments to children's literature courses, and created an environment in which the serious study of children's literature is both possible and respectable.

Furthermore, that study would not be so serious without reference to some of these newer approaches to literature. The sort of "New Criticism" that represented the end of the evolutionary trail in my undergraduate days, and that focussed the endeavor of literary scholarship on the act of engendering interpretations—of finding the subtle meanings buried in texts—tends to make the study of children's literature seem silly and more than a little superfluous. If books written for ten-year-olds, or even two-year-olds, actually need to be interpreted by adult scholars who possess the subtle analytical skills developed only after years of thought and training, then what on earth are ten-year-olds or two year-olds without Ph.D.s supposed to make of them? And adult scholars can hardly take pride in arriving after deep and concentrated thought at the meaning of a book written with the idea that it would offer pleasure and instruction to an inexperienced ten-year-old. In...